Thursday, September 16, 2010

Texas Tech University's United Spirit Arena has a new floor design. Here's a photo I took last night at the women's volleyball home opener. The new design has the surrounding out-of-bounds area in red, with no coloration of the keys (you may click on the images to enlarge them).

The new key features the Big XII logo, which is kind of odd because this summer's conference realignment has shrunk the conference to 10 schools. The company which repainted the floor, School Graphics, has a photo essay documenting the process.

Lastly, for comparison purposes, here's an old image I found on the web, of what the United Spirit Arena's court used to look like.

Both the old and new designs sport the university's traditional Double-T logo at center-court, although it appears to be somewhat bigger on the new floor. The old floor, of course, utilized both of the school's main colors, red (for the keys) and black (out of bounds). A more subtle shift is that, whereas both baselines used to say "TEXAS TECH," now only one says "TEXAS TECH" and the other says "RED RAIDERS."

I attended the first-ever basketball game in the United Spirit Arena, on November 19, 1999, when Bob Knight (who became Texas Tech's coach two seasons later) brought his Indiana squad to Lubbock to face the Red Raiders. I immediately took a liking to the black-outline/red-key floor. Whether the new floor will grow on me remains to be seen...